Course Page for Fall 2024 Regular - Washington, Sarah Lisa

The criminal legal system has been the subject of much critique. Calls for reform, decarceration, and even abolition of the system, while more prominent now, are longstanding. But the criminal legal system does not operate isolated from other legal systems. This seminar will interrogate how various legal systems impact individuals, families, and communities. We will take a critical look at the ways the criminal legal system, the immigration system, and the family regulation system (child welfare system) interact with one another. This seminar will draw on historical and sociological lenses as well as experiential epistemologies, critical legal perspectives, and feminist legal scholarship.

Course Page for Fall 2024 Regular - Meyn, Ion

Examine historical and structural injustices that drive racially discriminatory practices and outcomes in the criminal legal system. Explore the system’s racially discriminatory approach to surveillance, street detention, arrest, charging, pretrial detention, trial, sentencing, and probation. Consider how constitutional “rights” expand the discretion of state actors to exert unaccountable power. Critically examine narratives within the criminal legal system and law school curriculum that legitimize a mass incarceration crisis that targets communities of color and undermines public safety.

This course meets with Prof. Meyn's undergraduate Legal Studies course of the same name. With respect to Law students in the course, he anticipates assigning 3-4 writing assignments. These assignments will require law students to conduct independent research. For example, the first few weeks of the course examines conceptions of public safety between the 1600s and the present. Prof. Meyn plans to ask law students to study historical newspapers and other relevant historical texts to further illuminate or contest the texts and ideas discussed in class about what public safety has meant at different times in this country’s history. Where undergraduates take three exams that test their understanding of the presented material, JD students will be expected to understand the material presented, and thus expected through writing assignments to deepen our understanding of course concepts through the presentation of findings from their own research into historical documents and scholarly texts.

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Course Page for Fall 2024 Regular - Stevenson, Adam

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Course Page for Fall 2023 Regular - Wright, Steven

This seminar, which satisfies the upper-level writing requirement, will introduce students to the basics of federal criminal sentences. The Course will focus on the mechanics of federal sentencing, with an emphasis on the statutory factors that judges must consider when determining a prison sentence. This seminar, which meets once a week, is ideal for students seeking careers as federal judicial clerks, federal prosecutors, federal public defenders, immigration lawyers.

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Course Page for Fall 2024 Regular - Judson, Kate

Forensic evidence used in criminal cases has come under intense scrutiny recently because much of it never has been scientifically validated and some has been proven to be highly unreliable. More than ten years ago, the National Academy of Sciences issued a groundbreaking report concluding as much. Yet forensic “science” rarely is studied in either the law school curriculum or in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curriculum, either at the undergraduate or graduate level. This is the first course at the University of Wisconsin—and among the first in the nation—to fill that void by bringing together law students and STEM students to examine law & forensic science.

Course Page for Spring 2024 ZPO - O'Leary, Renagh

Discussions about the criminal legal system often focus on its “front end”: policing, prosecution, adjudication, and sentencing. This seminar will examine the system’s “back end”: prison release and re-entry. Through historical, sociological, and legal lenses, the seminar will explore prison release and re-entry from the early 20th century to the present. Every student will be required to write a final research paper, which may satisfy the Upper Level Writing Requirement.

Course Page for Fall 2024 Regular - Klingele, Cecelia

This course is designed to help you explore and better understand the purposes and structures of punishment in the U.S. criminal justice system. By the end of this course, you should be able to:
• Identify the traditional purposes of punishment, understand tensions between them, and explain how they manifest in today’s criminal justice system.
• Understand the kinds of sanctions imposed by American courts, and the uses and limitations of each.
• Know how to use interdisciplinary research to augment your legal understanding of sentencing and correctional issues, and better advocate for clients.

Recent Offerings of this course by this instructor